The $1.5 billion carrier voice market is facing challenges as service providers evaluate VoLTE infrastructure and voice subscriber growth slows down.
The increasing market for VoLTE devices like telephony application servers and IP multimedia subsystem core devices contrasted to a pause in spending on traditionally popular session border controllers and wireline voice applications servers, which together experienced a 3% annual decline.
Dell’Oro attributed this deceleration to low adoption rates of the business telephony service, session initiation protocol trunking, outside of the US. Despite this, vendors Alcatel-Lucent, Broadsoft, Metaswitch and Sonus Networks were found to be bucking the decline.
"The most important trend underway in the telecom voice market is VoLTE. It is stimulating significant spending both in the wireless infrastructure, but also in the wireline infrastructure," said Chris DePuy, analyst at Dell'Oro Group. "In the third quarter 2012, we now have three operators commercially operating VoLTE services. The success of these services will very likely influence the continued adoption of VoLTE by other operators."
The first VoLTE services were launched earlier this month by US operator MetroPCS and Korean operator SK Telecom.
